The First Seed

It started with a garden.

Not mine, of course. My mother's. A crooked patch of sunlit earth wedged between rusting fence panels, where she taught me to bury things and watch them grow.

She said you had to talk to seeds – that they bloomed better when they were heard. And I believed her, because I was seven and she was everything. I told the soil my secrets. My fears. That I hated when Dad came home loud and left louder.

When I was eleven, she buried herself.

I planted nothing after that.

People say the end began with the bombs, but that's not true. Bombs are never the beginning. They're punctuation marks – violent full stops at the end of quiet, ignored sentences.

I'd been in the Zone for six years by the time the Coalition set their sights on us. They called us defectors, deserters, cowards. But they were the ones who'd stripped our homes for oil and minerals and then branded us dangerous when we asked to breathe clean air. We didn't fight at first. We just left.

I didn't pick up a rifle until they brought the children into it.

After that, well. I didn't have a choice.

Her name was Rhea. Barely twenty, all fire and sarcasm. She was the kind of girl who wrote poetry in the margins of tactical manuals and painted flowers on the barrels of broken rifles. I liked her. Everyone did. She reminded people what we were fighting for.

The day she died, it wasn't quick.

We found her three clicks from camp, hanging from a tree the Coalition had set alight. They left a sign nailed above her head:

"No weeds in Eden."

I remember the way her toes pointed down, as if she were trying to touch the scorched grass.

That night, I stole a vial from the medical stores – blackroot, lethal in the right dose. Commander Jex caught me before I reached the perimeter.

"You planning to drink that?" he asked. He always looked tired, like even blinking took more energy than he had.

"No," I said. "Planning to deliver it."

He didn't ask to whom.

He handed me a knife and told me to make it quick.

The man's name was Sergeant Doyle. He used to be one of us – before he ratted out the caravan routes and let the Coalition burn ten families alive.

He lived alone now, holed up in the ruins of an old train station outside Sector Five. Said he was a changed man. Said the Lord had forgiven him.

But I didn't come for absolution.

I came for Rhea.

I told him I was there to talk. That I wanted to understand. I sat across from him in the dark, passed him a canteen laced with poison. He drank, smiled, started to choke.

I watched the light go out of his eyes like someone slowly dimming a lantern.

Then I dragged his body into the weeds and planted a wildflower where his heart had been.

It was the first thing I'd planted in eleven years.

People started whispering after that.

They said I had a list. That I was hunting the defectors who'd switched sides. That I didn't blink anymore.

I let them talk.

It made the ones who deserved it easier to find.

The worst was Erin Lorne. A medic. Pretty. Smart. Betrayed a whole bunker's worth of wounded rebels for a bounty and a full pardon.

I found her three months later, tending patients in a pristine Coalition field hospital.

She looked right at me and said my name like it still meant something.

"Kael," she whispered. "You're alive."

I smiled and pulled her into a hug. I whispered in her ear that I forgave her.

Then I slid the knife into her ribs.

She bled out on the white tiled floor. The patients screamed. The guards didn't get to me in time.

They never do.

When they finally caught me, it wasn't for a killing.

It was for the seeds.

I left them everywhere. A black dahlia on a grave. Poppies beside a poisoned well. Belladonna wrapped in paper at a traitor's bedside. It became a calling card of sorts. A signature.

The press named me The Gardener.

The rebels called me necessary.

The Coalition called me evil.

I sat in my cell and waited.

Until she came.

A girl in a grey uniform, young – too young. Her hands trembled as she unshackled me. She didn't speak until we were past the checkpoint and climbing through a vent so narrow I tasted dust with every breath.

"I followed your trail," she whispered. "I found the flowers."

I stared at her.

"Why?"

"My brother was in the bunker Erin Lorne sold out. He made it out. Barely. You...killed her."

"I did."

"He wanted to thank you."

A pause.

"And so do I."

We crawled in silence after that.

I never got her name.

They dropped the bombs two weeks later.

Fire over the Zone. No warning. No evacuation.

I watched from a cliffside bunker as everything I'd planted turned to ash.

They said it was retaliation. That someone had assassinated a Coalition commander.

They blamed me.

And, for once, they were wrong.

I found Commander Jex in the ruins of Camp Twelve. His lungs were glass. His hands were burned down to meat. But he was alive. Just.

"They'll never stop," he rasped.

"They will," I said. "I'll make sure of it."

"You're not God, Kael."

"No," I said. "But I'm the closest thing they'll see."

He didn't smile. Just closed his eyes.

I buried him with a single seed: wolfsbane.

The last straw came when they opened Eden.

A gated utopia for the Coalition's elite. Artificial sky, sterile soil, crops engineered to feed a thousand – and not a single rebel allowed past its walls.

The starving watched from outside the gates.

And they smiled.

That's when I decided.

Eden would burn.

I got in disguised as a labourer. Slipped past biometric scans with stolen fingers. Posed as a hydro-tech for twelve days. Memorised blueprints. Located the oxygen intake valves, the coolant reservoirs, the seed vault.

They stored their future in that vault.

Corn that glowed in the dark. Rice that grew in drought. Tomatoes the size of fists.

I rigged it all with explosives.

But I didn't detonate them.

Not at first.

I gathered the leaders in the central plaza. Told them who I was. Told them what I'd done.

One of them – a general – stepped forward.

"You're bluffing," she said. "You wouldn't destroy salvation for your people."

I stared at her.

"My people?"

"Yes. Rebels. Deserters. Whatever you call yourselves. You'll die without this."

I smiled.

"No," I said. "You will."

Then I pressed the detonator.

They survived, of course.

Some of them.

I made sure the seeds blew far enough to scatter. The rebels would find them. Replant them. Grow something new.

But Eden, as a city, as a concept – that burned.

I watched from a hillside as fire consumed the domes. Glass rained down like stars. And for the first time in years, I cried.

Not for the dead.

But for what it took to make it happen.

They caught me again.

Dragged me to trial. Made a spectacle of it. Broadcast it on every surviving channel.

"Do you admit to the charges?" the judge asked.

"I do."

"You killed thousands."

I nodded.

"You destroyed Eden."

"Yes."

"You are a monster."

I looked up. Found the camera. Let the world see my face.

"I didn't have a choice."

They sentenced me to death.

But the rebels? They remember me differently.

Some call me a murderer. A zealot. A weed that strangled the garden.

Others?

They say I sowed the first seed of freedom.

Either way, I'm ready.

I hear they'll bury me in the old Zone.

If the ground's not too scorched, maybe something will grow.